Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 333: Tron & Spy Hunter with George Gomez

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

Jeremy Parish chats one-on-one with an arcade gaming legend: George Gomez, who discusses the critical creative role he played in bringing classic arcade works like Spy Hunter and Tron to market and designing their iconic cabinets. Art by Nick Wanserski.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. So this week I have calling in remotely because it's pandemic times, as usual. George Gomez, who you are with Stern now, is that correct? Yeah, yeah.

I'm the chief creative officer for Stern Pimball, so I am responsible for basically all of the company's product development efforts. I run a studio of 50 designers, developers, engineers, artists, you know, that develop all of the Stern pinball machines. Right. And you, you know, you're working with Stern and pinball now, but you have quite a history of working in video games going back quite a ways, you know, within the amusement industry beyond just pinball but also to arcade games. and, you know, kind of some other areas. So I'd love to just talk to you about that, especially some of your early work,

because the first thing I saw in your resume was Spy Hunter, which was a game I sunk a lot of quarters to back in the day. And I'd love to hear, you know, your stories about kind of how that project came to be and what it was like working on it and kind of where you went from there. Yep. So I have a, I have a bachelor's degree in industrial design. And so I've been doing this for 40-some-odd years, you know, I went to work right out of school. I went to work at Midway Games when Midway was a ballet company. And so, you know, I walked in the door in October of 78.

And so I spent the first seven years of my career at Midway, you know, working on coin-operated arcade games. And so I, you know, the two big ones that I had a lot of impact. on our Tron and then Spy Hunter. I did some work on Satan's Hollow, and I touched a lot of the company's products in those days in more, you know, and less. So industrial designers touch a lot of different things from the perspective of how a human interacts with it.

And, you know, a really very, very simplistic distinction between a designer and an engineer is that a design, works at man-machine interface, and an engineer works at machine-machine interface, you know. So an engineer worries about how many gears, how many ball bearings, does it last, does it function as it should, you know, is it easy to manufacture it? Can you, you know, can you mass-produce this? How does it all go together? Can you service it? A designer works at, you know, what does this thing look like? What's it feel like? How do you feel when you interact with it? What are the feedback things that you take away, that make it a good experience or a bad experience.

And so I had a, you know, I had a professor at school that said, you know, you should work in something that you really have a passion for because you're going to be that much better at it. And the other thing he said to me is he said, you know, a lot of times companies don't understand that they need designers. Now I know, I know that's hard to imagine in 2020, but in 1978, there were more lawyers in Rhode Island than there were industrial designers in this country. And the large concentrations of industrial designers in 1978 were working on in traditional environments where they had already worked in for many years.

Like, for example, the automotive industry in 1978 employed a large portion, the global automotive industry employed a large number of the industrial designers walking the face of the earth. The same thing with, you know, consumer products, right? There were a lot of industrial designers and consumer products. I looked at video games at the time, and I just thought I was playing them and I was having fun with them, but out of ignorance, out of the ignorance, the naivete of being a new, you know, freshly minted designer or somebody in design school, I thought that they were

horrible. You know, I thought they could really use help. and I didn't understand the limitations of the technology. I didn't understand the impact or limitations that, for example, a coin-operated game company, games have to be very robust, and they have to be, you know, they have to exist in environments where they're going to take a beating, and they have to be, you know, they're going to be moved from location to location as a function of how the product works. And, and so I didn't, I didn't really realize that, you know, that the company was making compromises to perhaps the appearance of a product due to cost manufacturing constraints, the, you know, what it took to get a game to be as strong as it needed to be, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I just looked at them and interacted with them from the perspective of, man, this thing, you know, this doesn't look like a very cool device. And I think I could make it better. So out of ignorance, I started sort of paying attention to how games were designed.

And I didn't know where the boundaries were drawn. I didn't know what does a designer get to touch? What does he not get to touch? I thought designers did all of it. So I thought the same guy that determined what things on screen looked like was the same guy that was designing the joysticks and the cabinets and the art on the sides. I didn't really didn't realize that. there were these work divisions you know i just sort of knew that oh there's some electronics guys doing some you know making the electronics work and there's you know but i didn't really

comprehend the the specificity of all of the different specialties you know so uh like i said i you know i'd had this professor and said you should work it working something you let i was playing a game at the time and i looked up and it said midway games franklin park illinois and i you know I went to school at the University of Illinois and Chicago. So I thought, wow, these Franklin Park, that's a suburb of Chicago that I don't even have to move. These guys are here. So, you know, I found, I didn't even know how to get into the company. I found a headhunter that had a connection into the company, you know, like a recruiter,

and he had a connection to the company, and he got me an interview. And leading up to the interview, I took some, you know, this back in those days, designers interview with what was called a portfolio they still interviewed with a portfolio but nowadays a portfolio somebody sends me a link to a website and I look at what I look at their work or somebody sits in front of me and hands me an iPad and I scroll through a series of images or or videos about their work right and back in those days a portfolio was a real portfolio it was like this giant book that had your renderings and sketches and stuff like that and so what what you learn in design school is how you, you know, the craft of being a designer means that you have to take,

you have to be able to take the ideas in your head and the ideas relative to solving the problems that you're posed. And you have to be able to communicate these ideas. And communicating and realizing these ideas, exploring them, if you will, means that you have to be very hands-on. You have to be able to build models, of things. You have to be able to draw and sketch and visualize. And at some point in time, you have to be able to make, you know, really cool renderings of things that are going to convince someone that your idea is worth pursuing, that it's really, the thing in your head is really cool. So there's not a lot of space to be a designer if you can't express your ideas in some

tangible way. And tangible way means not a conversation, not arm waving, but you have to be able to put these ideas down on paper. You have to be able to build something. In today's world, you know, designers work with computers just like every other. You know, we use CAD tools. We use, you know, we still create renderings. We still make models. Some of the models nowadays might come off a 3D printer, but you know, you still need to explore those kinds of things. So, long story short, I took a portion of my portfolio and ran around the city with a polar red camera, took some images of midway games and redesigned them my way. I didn't really know what I was doing, but, you know, I did that. And when I went in for my interview,

some guys came in, they, they paged through my book and, and I think they were impressed at the amount of thought that, you know, I had given to the thing. And they laughed at some of my stuff also, by the way, you know, because, yeah, I didn't really know that my stuff wasn't real based in things that were, you know, they, I thought they were producible, but they really weren't at the time. And then they toured me through the factory. It was a mind-blowing experience, right? know, the factory, the Midway Factory at the time was a beautiful, new, well-lit factory, and it was a behemoth. I mean, that thing, at the height of the video game boom in the late 70s, early 80s, the Midway Factory was producing something like 1,100 upright video games a day, uprights and sit down video games a day. So if you imagine 1,100 games a day, there were semis with hard. raw material, stacked up for blocks.

So, you know, I went in, I got an interview. So, you know, I went in, I got an interview, I went Into Midway, they were producing a lot of games at the time, Space Invaders, the Taito Space Invaders, was on the line. Yeah, that was a, that was a kind of an interesting feature of the sort of early days of the arcade was that, you know, all these companies that we know now because they're giants in Japan and have a huge presence on consoles and PCs were like actually pretty small at the time and didn't have the size or the funding to really penetrate into the U.S. So they relied on partners in the U.S. to not only, you know, distribute games, but also to manufacture them for them.

Yeah, so the magic there was that basically it was, I mean, they were big companies. They were big companies in Japan, and they had an international presence. The difference was that, you know, you're talking about a product that's pretty big and heavy, right? You're talking about a 300-pound arcade game. So when you fill a container full of those things and you ship them across the ocean, it gets kind of expensive. So the magic of having manufacturing locally and in whatever market you were in was that that whole thing went away. And so the relationship between Namco, Taito, et cetera, all the different key companies that

meant, you know, that basically licensed product to Midway was the fact that Midway could produce that stuff and distribute it. So Midway was selling and distributing that product in its, in the North, American markets on behalf of those companies. So what would happen is that my very first work in professional work at Midway was in helping to get some of those products into manufacturing. So the only thing that would come over here was boards, you know, print of circuit boards like the electronics hardware and the code and everything else, cables, cabinets, controls, all that stuff. was sourced domestically.

And there's a big engineering effort in that because nobody realizes, but at the time, metric-sized materials were less common here in the States. So a Japanese cabinet would be designed with 15-millimeter plywood. And in America, you know, you couldn't source 15-millimeter plywood reliably or affordably. So that means that you had to take the Japanese design and realize it in difference, you know, different sized materials. So, you know, for example, in, you know, an English measure material. So, you know, you'd end up with three quarter inch plywood, right? Yeah, because 15 millimeters is like some weird size. It's like three fifths. And no one, no one makes that. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean,

they make, you know, nowadays, you can get 15 millimeter plywood. No problem. But, but back in those days, it was much harder. And the same thing with a controller, you know, a controller is made up of, you know, it's entirely designed in metric. And you can't just take, you know, non- metric-based size materials and work with them and to achieve the same results. The stuff just won't fit together. It won't work. So all of that stuff was re-engineered, you know, redesigned. The other issue is that at that time, the Japanese market, their arcades were a much nicer, gentler environment than American arcades. And so a lot of times what we found in looking at the Japanese product is that the sensibilities of the Japanese designers

were such that the product wasn't as rugged as the American product. Yeah, so, you know, in the, in that time frame, in the late 70s and the early 80s, big Japanese video game companies like Taito and Sega were some of the biggest operators of machines in Japan. Japan and the Pacific Rim were basically, you would go into a location, an arcade, and most of the games were from those companies. So they were basically covering all bases. They designed and manufactured, and they had, of course, they had a selling and marketing arm, but they also had operations. So in other portions of the world, here in the States, Bally Midway at the time had a similar scenario in that they owned Bally's Aladdin's

Castle. So Aladdin's Castle was essentially Bally's operations arm. And so they, you know, they operated locations where not only could they field their own product, but they would field product from other people. So back in those days, you know, you had, if you had manufacturing and you had distribution and you had operations, you were basically covering all the bases. And only the big companies could do that. So getting back to why games were re-engineered when they were. got here is is that the bottom line is it was cheaper to send software or just software like you know you could send a box of of iCs of of chips you know which is what you know basically how we installed software into games back then you know there was no no downloading remember no

USB sticks nothing like that you know that you burn the software into you know the game code into an e-prom and you know you had a collection of chips that you plugged into the board and they contained the graphics, the sound, and the game code. So were they sending you just like crates and crates of chips, or was it a matter if they were sending you a few chips that then you would basically reproduce and manufacture on your side? Right. So they would send us a couple of chips,

and we would replicate them over here. Okay. In some cases, depending on, like in the startup phases, they might actually send us full hardware sets. So you might get board sets. that were manufactured in Japan, and that, you know, that might get you up and running quickly. But a lot of times even hardware was produced here. And, you know, so you're essentially, you had to re-engineer to components, like I was saying,

especially physical things like, you know, plywood and steel and plastic. You had to work with domestically sourced components, which were all English measure back then, right? So there was an engineering effort in doing that. The other thing about, to keep in mind, is that Japanese sensibilities in terms of the arcade market were substantially more, how would you say, you know, they were more careful. Their locations didn't get a lot of vandalism. Their locations, you know, just as a culture, they operated games in a way that they didn't take as much of a beating as they do here in the state. Yeah, there seems to be more of a consideration in public spaces over there. Like, you can still find really old arcade machines.

They're up and running. And, you know, even when it comes to buying home console goods, you know, vintage, like, controllers and stuff, you know, I'll typically seek out Japanese controllers if I can find them, you know, from Japanese sellers if they're compatible with U.S. systems, because you can get like a super NES controller, super Famicom that looks like it's brand new. And you're just not going to find that in the U.S. It's going to be just beaten all to hell. Right.

So if you think about that, that particular aspect that we just mentioned, and if you just look at the design of their products in comparison to the design of the products that were fielded in the United States, Western Europe, and basically North America, South American, in Western Europe, you'll find that the rest of the world's products were substantially more. rugged because they needed to be given the, you know, the environment that they were operated in. So when, you know, when I first got hired at Midway to get back to the Midway development group, Midway was doing so much licensing that the most of the development work that Midway did for original Midway Games was done at two consulting firms that were owned by the company. One was Dave Nutting in Associates, and the other one was arcade engineering in Fort Lauderdale. And both of these companies were wholly owned Bally companies, but they existed as independent R&D outfits. For example, you know, Dave Nutting had a history with the company having done games like gunfight and Sea Wolf.

And some of the games from that era, you know, I think Tombstone, I can't remember all of them. but uh and then when on in the modern era the stuff that were in the beginning of the modern era with the stuff that people remember finally are games like gorf and wizard of war and you know they were a standalone development house they would do r and d on on games they would get the games up and running they would design you know as as fantastical a vision for the game as they could and then the game would come into the in-house engineering group at midway and it would get ruggedized and redesigned with the notion of mass producing lots of them, right? So in the case of both arcade engineering and Dave Nutting, they focused a lot on, you know, just let's just

make something that's really cool. And the guys in-house at Midway will take it, make it very rugged, we'll make it mass-producible, we'll make it so that the company can make thousands of So the development group that went on to create things like Tron, Spy Hunter, Rampage, all those games, was born of an engineering group that began life as a support group, meaning that, you know, when I was first hired, I was in the in-house engineering group, and we were taking all of the product, the licensed product from the Japanese and the homegrown product from Dave Nutting and Associates and from Arcade Engineering. We were performing that function of making it mass-producible, reliable, rugged, refined so that you could mass-produce it. So I was part of that group, Bill Adams, who was the lead programmer on Tron, and, you know, guys like Tom Leone, who was the lead programmer on Spy Hunter and Brian Kolan and Jeff Nauman, who created Rampage. All of those people came out of that in-house group. Okay. So the in-house group, we were very, you know, we were young, motivated.

We wanted to make games, but our sort of how we got our foot in the door was through, you know, through that in-house engineering group. And I think you've heard, or I mean, a lot of people have heard me tell the story that when the company's licensing group brought the Tron license into the company, you know, we begged the in-house group that the company had decided that they were going to do a sort of a playoff to determine which of the two external groups, either DNA, Dave Nutting, or Arcade, Arcade Engineering in Florida, we're going to develop the game. game and you know bill adams and i begged to be included in the competition and so the competition was basically just you know let's get together you know let you guys think about the game we'll give the scripts from the film to everybody everybody think about you know what the game would be and then we'll get together and and everybody can pitch you know DNA can pitch you know Bill and George can pitch, arcade can pitch on what they would do with the game. And that's the way it played out.

And Bill and I got very lucky. We really took it to heart. There were three of us at the time, a very bright software, hardware engineer, electronics engineer, Attis Gosh, who is a good friend, and he went on to design chips and stuff. But he designed what's known as the MCR2, the Midway Card rack system 2. and that's the system that supported games like, you know, like Tron and Satan's Hollow. And then it evolved with scrolling function for Spy Hunter and Rampage and stuff like that. So the three of us, you know, were, I think Bill was the oldest of us.

I think he must, Bill must have been about 27 at the time. He had a master's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois. Atis had an electrical engineering degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, you know, great engineering school. And I was an industrial designer. I went to school at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and we, and the three of us were very motivated to make games. And during that time that they gave us, I figured, you know, the month or whatever to think about the game, we dug into the scripts and started trying to generate stuff. So, Atish had designed. Just a quick question.

I take it that you were developing Tron before the movie was actually out. So you were working from the scripts. Did you have storyboards or production stills or anything to kind of get a sense of the aesthetics? We had a little bit, not much. Okay. We had, so the game was being developed concurrently with the film. So there wasn't a lot. They were ahead of us, no doubt.

And I spent a poor, we had a very short period of time to do this. had, I don't know what it was, maybe it was nine months. I can't remember nine, you know, between the time that the company inked the deal and the time that, you know, that, because the plan had been that we were going to do a competition, a national competition hosted by Aladdin's castles. Remember I mentioned Aladdin's Castle was a midway valley company, right? Yeah, you know, I picked up a copy of the Tron soundtrack on vinyl, a vintage copy a couple of years ago and the person who sold it had some press clippings of like reviews of the arcade machine and there was a coupon in there for Aladdin's castle and I just made that connection of like

oh that's you know it was all part of the same group that makes sense that's right yep so the plan had been to roll out tron machines into the Aladdin's castle locations were nationwide and do a competition and pick you know 30 kids and then send them I think I actually think that the actual number ended up being 32 I don't why that sticks in my head, but 32 kids and send them to New York, do a big playoff with 32 Tron machines on the floor of Madison Square Garden. And then at the end of the competition, select a winner. We had a big lunch at Tavern on Green in New York City. And then we went to a theater somewhere in Manhattan, I think that, if I recall, where we saw the premiere the movie and and you know the stars where they are and it was it was great it was fun a lot of

fun but let's roll the tape back so here we are whatever that period of time was nine months in front and we have to do a game in that and the and the film is being basically the film was in it wasn't quite in editing they were still capturing you know some stuff um and i spent a good portion of that winter at Disney Studios, you know, in L.A. working with the film guys to make sure that everything ended up, you know, sort of together in terms of the game. There were some challenges there because they would change their minds and a change for them was very difficult for us. And so there was a, at some point in time, they hadn't made up their minds, whether the bad guys were blue or the bad guys were red. And there was a lot of

back and forth on this and and things like you know like the grid bugs you know everybody everybody laughs about the you know the two second clip of grid bugs in the film and that's because you know the grid bugs were a cool visual to us because it looked like a spider right looked like a mechanical spider and so we um we had picked up on that we built an entire wave in the game around it and and and then i got to i was at disney and i was showing them some of our work and they said you know we cut the grid box out of the film. And I'm like, guys, we've got a whole wave here. And so they ended up like, okay, all right, right, we'll figure something out.

So they went and put him back in the film for like two seconds. So that actually ends up being a video game tie-in sort of in a backward sort of sense. Yes. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. There was also things like, I mean, I think that like the very first prototypes of the Tron cabinet or actually the Space Paranoids cabinet in the film when you go into Flynn's arcade.

So there's, you know, there was some back and forth, right? And we didn't, we, you know, we were sort of, it was tandem development on something like that. In today's world, it might be a little easier. I mean, because we have such, you know, our tools are so much more powerful. But back then, you know, I worked mostly with the effects director for the film, a guy named Richard Taylor, real talented guy that had come out of the commercial business. He did some of the very first computer graphics used in commercials. If I remember correctly, like no one today has seen these, unless you're my age, but there were these seven-up commercials that were very inspired by the artist Peter Max, and those computer graphics. And that concept was,

if I recall the Richard Taylor thing. So, but anyway, uh, that's who I worked with, you know, and, and I went, I would go out there. They had, they had created all of the, um, the costumes and props with a printed circuit board layout tape. You know, they would paint the thing in neutral color so they could colorize it, you know, and they could shoot a green screen and then colorize it. And they, uh, so that all the helmets and all the, you know, hockey pads and all the stuff, they made up Tron's costume were basically, you know, sprayed white with, and somebody at hand, you know, had laid out the print circuit board tape on the surface of the thing, you know, the hockey helmet or whatever, to, you know, to create the effect. But that way they could, you know, that's how they

determine, oh, yeah, he's glowing blue or, no, he's glowing red. But, you know, getting back to how we got to do the game, we took it to heart. We, we, Bill actually, you know, You know, I made a bunch of, you know, we call them story boards, but they were really, they were big arted boards that I still have them. I'm going to be donating them to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. And so what I did is I visualized, you know, each of the waves that we would be putting in the game. And originally we had, I think, we had like seven concepts and we seven or eight and we narrowed it down. We started narrowing it down because we were, you know, there was the time constraint and then there was also the issue of just the hardware resources of the electronics just couldn't deal with all the stuff we were creating. And so we were very ambitious with this, especially with the dysotron wave, which ended up just getting cut completely and becoming.

the sequel and that work that the sequel work was done by um guy named bob dinnerman and myself and and some of the artists Yeah, so we had gone ahead and, you know, we had, Bill had stuff moving on screen. We were proposing the use of the existing MCR2 system, which had really not been used much. You know, I think Satan's Hollow had used it. Nothing else had used it. And I had done a bunch of cabinet concepts, and I was pitching the notion of the blowing grips and all this stuff. So we went to the, to the meeting about who was going to get

to Deutron with all this stuff. And I think, I think Dave Nutting, you know, was a very established and, you know, he's a super talented guy. He's one of my early mentors in, in the business. And I just, I think those guys, they showed up with a conversation. And, um, as said, with Ronnie Hellerberton in Florida, the great guys, amazingly talented guys. Um, but they didn't think they had anything to prove. They basically said, you know, we'll just go to this thing. And I think that I think the management guys were impressed with the amount of effort that we had put into the presentation of what we would do. And so they said, you know, there's something to existing hardware in the case of, so arcade engineering at the time was exploring a lot of vector stuff.

And so they were proposing a vector hardware solution. Dave Nutting was doing the same. Dave Nutting was even further out because the Dave Nutting solution, by the way, arcade engineering did Omega Race, if you've ever seen that game on that vector hardware that they were proposing, which was essentially a knockoff hardware set from the Asteroids hardware. And then Dave Nutting had a very advanced thing that Dave Nutting was actually the very first time I ever saw three, dimensional graphics and a video game was some bleeding edge R&D that Dave Nudding was doing.

Dave Nudding had a flying game, a space flying game called Earth Friend. And that game was using a three-dimensional vector system. And I mean, you're talking about 1977, you know, 78, that time frame that those guys were developing that stuff. And, and then eventually ended up proposing it, you know, for Tron a few years later in, you know, whatever it was, 81 or in that time frame. So, so really bleeding-edge stuff for the time. The problem with bleeding edge stuff is it's really hard to pinpoint when you're going to be reliable and when you're going to be usable to the point where somebody can mass-produce your stuff. So there was a big risk with the notion of this contractual relationship with Disney and the fact that, you know,

that, hey, we got to have games on the floor at Aladdin's castles with some anticipation of the movie premiere and the movie launch, right? Because, you know, you can't put the games out there after the movies launch. You've got to be ahead of it. So the tremendous amount of pressure, and I think that the combination of enthusiasm and the practicality of, hey, the MCR2 is at this point a pretty stable system, these guys are not these guys first of all they're intimately familiar with it and they they've programmed on it and worked on it and so yeah we should probably do that so the other

odd thing about tron is that in those days a video game was designed and made by a couple of guys you know there was a guy on the arc side and a guy on the code side and and that didn't take much more than that and so the interesting thing about tron is that bill said i'm going to be the master architect of this thing, but I'm going to have software engineers working on each wave and I'm going to pull it all together and I'm going to tune the gameplay on these things. So him and I basically tuned the gameplay on all of all the waves, but he had a dedicated engineer for each one of those waves. Tom Leone, who I would go on to do the Spy Hunter work with, him and I worked on the tanks very closely together. You know, so the tanks wave was all time.

There was a couple other guys on the other waves, and Bill pulled it all together. Bill took one wave himself, I believe it was the MCP wave, and then pulled them all together and tied the game up. So, you know, that was the story. And so we went on to, you know, the three of us, Bill, Atish, myself. You know, we were there on location the very first time we put a Toronto on test at Adelaide's castle. It was, you know, it's a very cool thing that it was a.

it became a ritual in the rest of my career right that it's a thing you know you you always go to see your stuff on test on location that first night and you um you know you watch people interact with it from afar and it's you learn things about the game and that's how you begin to tune the game um and polish it and so you know we did that three of us uh went out saw the game on location we you know we uh followed the whole thing through uh continued we got it done miraculously um tons of crazy late nights and stuff. My first ever all-nighter, professional all-nighter, was working on that game. And then we got it, you know, we went, we flew out to New York for the premiere.

We saw the whole thing. You know, we watched the competition. We were amazed because the kids, like the guys that won and stuff, had discovered patterns that we didn't know about. And just a lot of skill. They played at a much higher level than the level that we, which we played. played. Well, it's really interesting to hear that, you know, kind of the direction that that game didn't take the paths that might have gone down to the vector graphics. I think, you know, speaking for myself, it's actually, I think, good that, you know, the game ended up going the

direction it did because it helped distinguish it from the other big movie tie-in game of 1982, which was the Star Wars arcade machine, which did use vector graphics. You know, I was like six, seven when those games came out. And to me at the time, Star Wars and Tron were the coolest things on the planet. So it was the most natural thing in the world to have these really great video game adaptations that really captured the look and the feel of the movie in totally different ways. So, you know, you really had this kind of great one-two punch of really, really fantastic, playable, cool-looking arcade machines based on great sci-fi movies that year. So, yeah, it's kind of an interesting thought process, I guess, or thought exercise. Yeah, I mean,

You know, I was, I mean, I was always very seduced by the, just the color of, you know, the way the phosphor in the CRT makes the pixel glow and with the, that color spills over to the pixel next to it. And there's this just, I don't know, it's just really interesting light quality to, to those graphics. And so I was very happy that we didn't, you know, the other issue with Vector at the time is that, you know, those games. games, they tend to, they tend to feel repetitive. And they tend to feel repetitive because there isn't the same, your brain is not filling in the blanks as well. And so, you know, it's like you're perceiving the graphics in a different way. So you play any of the games, you know, play battle zone, right? And, you know, even with just inherent lack of depth in the game from, you know, the limitations of the time, something about those games. games don't you know they don't they're interesting you know they're they're definitely interesting and they're captivating but i don't get the same i don't i'm not as attracted well you know listening to what you had to say about uh you know the physical element the physical aspect of designing an arcade cabinet for this market it kind of sounds like you're you're you had

to create a balancing act between basically creating an ATM machine that people were interacting with and kicking and, you know, pulling on and also making it elegant, you know, like arcade cabinets always had this tradition of looking stylish and interesting going all the way back to computer space, which was all, you know, that that sculpted fiberglass. Yeah, which by the way, that was Dave Notting. Right, right, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, he went way back with Atari and Nolan Bushnell and everyone, yeah. So, you know, it's a challenging balancing act, but Trond definitely was one of the, like, you just looked at it in the arcade and nothing else looked like it, aside from the light up elements, it just had a style that said, you know, this is sophisticated high-tech

computer stuff. Even the shape of the joystick was unusual. Yeah, so, you know, you know, it's funny because at the time, like people have said to me many times, you know, did you know you were creating something that was going to be so iconic? I was like, no, I, you know, I was 26 years old, I was trying to make something I thought was cool. I really didn't give it any thought. I didn't, I didn't imagine it was going to resonate with people. I didn't even think I was going to be in the business beyond a few years. I thought to myself, I thought, you know, this is, this is kind of fun to do right now, but, but I don't know that I'm going to be designing entertainment stuff for the rest of my life. I mean, as compelling as it was, you have to kind of put it in the context of, you know, you're in your 20s and you're into that and that's why you want to do it. But I didn't, know I'd be doing it forever, or I should say for my career. And so, yeah, I think I was trying to make something cool. I had one of the things that I noticed about the arcade stuff is that, so you know, when you go to the grocery store and you look at a grocery store shelf and it's full of neon cereal boxes. And the way to stand out is not with another color neon cereal box. The way to stand out is with a flat black box. So in Tron, we wanted those colors to jump. And it was odd. You know, I mean, it was a, it was a fight to tell people, hey, we're making a satin black cabinet and it's going to have these pinstripes. I mean, I've told a story.

I was at Disney one time, and I said to Richard Taylor, I said, what do you think the cabin should look like? And he said, I don't know, give me some shapes and, you know, we'll see what feels like Tron. So I said, okay, great, give me a sketchpad. I'll, I'll show you some stuff. And he says, well, I don't have anything like that, but downstairs. So, so his office was in the animation building at Disney Studios, which is another, a little interesting aside about the animation building is if you walk through that, and I don't even know if it exists anymore, but, but back then, if you walk through the building, there was corridors, and in the center of the building, there would be, there was like a round area.

So the corridors would empty into this round area, and it was a sort of an odd, feeling building because these round areas were on every floor and so I asked about it and the story I was told was that when Walt Disney went it was the first building that they built and when Walt Disney went to get the loan from the bank the bank said okay we'll give you the loan but you got to design the building like a hospital so that when you go out of business we can turn it into a hospital so those round areas in the middle of the building were designed to be like the nursing stations and all the rooms in the offices on the corridors were essentially, you know, hospital rooms. So, so he sends me to the basement of the animation building. And in the basement

of an animation building, there's real Disney animators on animation tables, you know, with, which I don't know if you've ever seen an animation table, but it looked like a, like the old wooden school desk that the kids sat at with the top that lifted up, put your books under, except that in that area there was a piece of milk white backlit glass and it was circular and you could rotate it and then it had it had pins and they would take the animation cells and index them to those pins and you know backlight them and they they drew literally on that and so um so the shape of the tron cabinet was finalized on one of those tables because they basically gave me they gave me some paper they gave me a couple of flares, and I did the, you know, I did the renderings right there,

then walked back up to Richard Taylor, and we sat, we pinned them on the wall. There was all these different shapes. And we said, you know what? That one looks like Tron. And that, I mean, that's how the profile of the cabinet came to be. And by the way, that profile, you know, it's really a derivative of the Tron profile, which I had drawn at, I'm not drawn, the GORF profile, which is really, which really doesn't belong to me. belongs to Dave Nutting.

And so after using a bunch of cutouts, if you look at the space paranoid cabinet in the film, you'll notice that the sides are cut into the cabinet, very traditional arcade-like from the time. And that was actually the very first mock-up cabinet that I built, which started out as a, had started out as a gwarf cabinet. So that's some of that story, you know, that, that, that cockpit area. with the MCP in the background in the game that cockpit is also from Gorf and I just opened it up and put the backlit you know trans light image behind it so you look you know my original

my original thought I wanted to make it look like the windshield on a on a bike but on the bikes but I didn't I couldn't mold a new piece so I had a kind of used the piece they had. So I just cut the windows into it and put the piece behind it so just to give it some dimensionality. Like you were in Tron's world in one of the vehicles from the film. It's interesting to hear that the game and movie development processes were so closely linked and there was so much crossover. But I guess that's appropriate given, you know, kind of what Tron was about. And it makes sense that it would be maybe the first film to really be developed kind of with the video game in mind and with, you know, the creative team for the video game

present and involved in the process. Yeah, I mean, you know, and those guys were so focused on their film that we were just kind of a pain in their ass, you know, I mean, I think if you found them today, they would barely remember us, you know, because we were just, they were so, you know, they were, they were thrilled about the thing they were doing and some of the, um, I remember, you know, it's so funny that technology has moved so fast and advanced so much. I remember that when we were discussing the cabinet art, Richard Taylor said to me, they had these two houses that were doing the rendering for the film on supercomputers, you know, and Magi was one, and I Triple I was the

other one, I think. And they, he said to me, goes, you know, pick an image, any image, and I'll send over a triple i they can render this thing for you and you'll have it in like three weeks i i could render that image on my desktop on a computer without a graphics card in about 30 seconds today you know so it's the the world is definitely changed but hey at the time i think how funny i think back to that and i go yeah it's going to take them two weeks to render this on a supercomputer to give it back to me. So like I said, if you find those guys, if you were to talk to those guys, we were just a pain in their ass. We were like, oh, yeah, you know, this Disney business, you know, has put us through this

video game company and good God, you know. How does crazy taxi stack up against, say, papers please? And what's the one 3-D-O-FMD game that gives Mario Party a run for its money? Find out on Hardcore Gaming 101's Top Games, where we objectively, definitively, and scientifically ranked the games you nominate for our ever-growing list. HG 101's Top Games. Twice a week, every week, right here on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hi, I'm Ray, and this is my friend Alex.

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And the best. We've been ranking comic book stories for six years. We have a list with over a thousand comics on it and we're adding more every month. Warwick-Ajax on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So, you know, I do want to talk about another sort of Lux cabinet that you helped work on, which was Spy Hunter. And, you know, I don't know if the shape of that was necessarily as memorable as, you know, and iconic as trons. but definitely the cabinet itself was such a huge part of the experience.

And I've played a lot of home conversions of Spy Hunter, and none of them have the same appeal. I mean, there's some very good conversions, but, you know, if you're not holding onto that control yoke with the triggers and the accelerator pedal, it's just not the same thing. Yeah, so the Spy Hunter story, so Bill Adams and I were taught, we, and Atis, we would go to lunch all the time. And, you know, we just talk about, you know, what should we make? what would be cool to make, et cetera. At the time, there was a movie called Blue Thunder. I don't remember if you remember this, Roy Scheider. I can't remember Blue Thunder.

It was police helicopter with lots of weapons and special abilities and stuff like that. And, you know, we would go back and forth. Like, we were all James Bond fans. We would go back and forth, you know, should be James Bond, should be Blue Thunder, you know. And because of the success of Tron, one of the perks that the company granted us, was they sent us to the JAMA show, which was the big Japanese game show in Tokyo. And so we went to Tokyo, and it was the time of, you know, the Walkman had just come out. And so, you know, here I am in Tokyo, and I'm whatever, 26 years old.

And I'm just eating this up. I've never seen anything like Tokyo. You know, I mean, the entertainment district just blows your mind. The electronics district just blows your mind. it just blows your mind. You just, this is just a different world. It's not Chicago.

It's, you know, I mean, Chicago is very cool and it's got its own thing, but it's, Tokyo at the time, for me,

was like, being transported to an alien planet. I mean, it was just very different. And so, any time I'm not on the floor of the show, kind of checking out cool games, I think we discovered,

have you ever seen Pango? Yeah, the penguin ice game. Yeah. Right. So I think we discovered, I mean, Bill and I discovered,

Pango. We spent the entire show playing Pango. So, but, so whatever minute I, we, I didn't have on the floor or the show, I was running around Tokyo, just trying to take this all in. And, you know, they had these like really cool three-dimensional movie marquees. Like, so we had to go find the theaters that had Tron, you know, because they had like giant three-dimensional Tron elements, you know, like light cycles and and you know tron himself and the and you know the girl and all this stuff just in huge three-dimensional you know all lit up and just beautiful um so we were running around the city taking it all in i bought a uh i bought a cannon 35 millimeter camera which i had always wanted i bought um i bought a walkman and at the store where i bought the walkman i picked up a tape

of a cassette tape of james bond's greatest hits and the whole idea for this you know what sort of jelled in my head on the plane on the way back I'm listening to this and I'm thinking about the films as I as I'm listening to the cassette and there's that notion of the point in the films when you know he's overwhelmed and the music changes and you know he's going to overcome but the odds are against him and he's got to do something. And so it sort of became like, hey, what if, you know, what if we tried to replicate those moments? Like, we tried to replicate the moment where the music rises and the action intensifies in the context of the game. Now, today, that's easy, right? I mean, we play games that are

cinematic in nature. And it's such a simple thing that to imagine that a game is like a film going going to change to impact you emotionally, right? So I started thinking about this. And when I got back, I started thinking, hey, it's a car with a lot of weapons. It's James Bond. And the game was sort of a skunkerick work project. It wasn't sanctioned by anybody until very late in the dev cycle. It was kind of being done on the side.

Tom Leon and I worked on a lot. And we were just kind of like screwing around with. Yeah, a lot of weapons. I thought, I'm going to make a controller that has distinct controls for all those weapons, which will help you get the feel of this. And what would this car be? It would be some sort of a supercar like the James Bond stuff, right? And so I took, I had a roll of drawing paper.

It was like, I don't know, it was 18 inch or something like that roll of yellow tracing paper, which was very common at the time. And yellow or white, like manila colored. And I drew the road, and I drew events on the road. And for a long time, when Tom was programming the game, he literally, he was in a cubicle. And he had taken the roll of paper, and he basically rolled it out along the walls of his cubicle. And we would walk up to the thing and sketch on the roll of paper about stuff that was happening in the game. So we were doing this game and we brought it up.

We digitized the music from the James Bond music. And we played the game with the James Bond music at the time and for a while. And so, you know, one day, remember that the business was beginning to trend down. So now it's like 83 or something and things are slowing down. It's the beginning of the, you know, the first collapse, the video game collapse. of 84. And remember I started out talking about how the company made like 1,100 arcade machines a day. And those numbers were tapering way down. And so management of the company thought that like diversifying the product line was possibly a solution. So we were doing novelty, like physical

novelty games, you know, like baseball games and all kinds of other weird stuff. And, And they were sort of shopping to see what we were doing. And one day, you know, my boss, Bill Adams had left the company. And the guy who was running engineering at the time was a guy named John Peserve. And John called me, he said, hey, we're going to be on the floor today. We're going to be looking at what you guys have and see what we, you know, if there's anything in there that we should accelerate or do something with. And he said, can you show that drive?

diving game thing that you and Tom are fooling around with. I said, sure. So we, we, I went and talked to Tom and we showed this thing. At the time, the cabinet, by the way, it was in a sit-down cabinet that actually had a canopy, had a smoked, it was a red cabinet, had a round-shaped smoked plexiglass canopy, which was cool when you were inside the cabinet, but the reason we didn't go in that direction is because it killed the notion of people standing around the cabinet watching you play. so they toured and we showed it and they're like okay when can we put this in production I was like wait wait wait time out this isn't ready for production this is like we don't have

anything we didn't have we hardly had anything we had a you know we had the car we had some enemies we hadn't figured out a lot a lot of things we hadn't figured out the weapons truck we didn't even have that we had none of that stuff and and so but they were impressed enough that they wanted to make it it was different and it was so then there was this huge rush to get the game out and then all of a sudden they gave they gave us more artists and they gave us you know they gave us all these resources that we didn't have and there was this push to get this thing on test and get it done one of the things that tom and i fought about a lot um was the the weapons truck because the original visions of the game had the the card just grew the weapons and and while that's very video gamey I just something about that just felt weird to me like I'm driving the road I didn't have rockets all of a sudden I've got rockets and you know just I don't know it's like I wanted some event and and he hated the notion of the weapons truck because he was like yeah I got to bring this truck out I got to figure out and night rider was also in that time yeah I was going to ask if that was right yeah night rider for sure and so so we're like you know like night rider and he's like yeah no I I mean, it's not cool enough. No, no, we got to do it.

So I forced it. We did it. It turns out, you know, it became a strategy thing in the game, which we, you know, he ended up polishing. But neither of us knew it was going to be a thing. It was just, it was just the truck. And the fact that it became very much a strategy element in the game was a happy accident of development, right? A lot of times, which is a lot of things happen that way. Yes, I mean, that's the whole bunch of different artists working on it.

And so we had a whole bunch of different artists working on it. And we had the thing that broke our heart about the music, which ended up working on our behalf, is that one day Tom Neiman, the licensing guy, who was also the licensing guy that brought Tron home, said, hey, can't get James Bond. Just, I forget whether they didn't want to do the deal or it was just stupid money or I don't know what the issue was. We couldn't get James Bond. So, okay, it can't be James Bond. What's it going to be? And he suggested Peter Gunn. And I was like, Peter Gone.

So we, you know, we put the Henry Mancini, Peter Gond thing in it. And at first we hated it. We were like, no, I want James Bond. And it was, no, I can get you Peter Gond. So we ended up using Peter Gond. Now, Peter Gond gets repetitive, really repetitive. So the whole concept that we started out with, the Zen of driving music, the you only have music when you have weapons kind of thing. we needed to we couldn't do the music all the time and it felt weird to go from no music to music so a really smart guy Bob Libby who was a sound guy at the time came up with hey why don't we do these jazz riffs and these jazz riffs are designed such that no matter they can plug in at any time and they and it sounds right and so as a matter of fact the sound board on that game the is

called the artificial artist, and they trademark that, TM, because the system randomly pieces those things together so that Peter Gunn isn't so repetitive, right? So when you have the rule stands, if you have weapons, you have music, and it always starts with Peter Gunn, but so that Peter Gunn doesn't get, like, make you go crazy, it transitions into those jazz riffs and then back to Peter Gunn and then, you know, and so on. So no weapons, no music, you know, So those are the, you know, I guess those are the Spy Hunter stories. I've told them a bunch of times. But, yeah, the, I mean, the music, it's interesting to hear that the game began with, you know, the germ of music, even if it wasn't the music that you wanted.

But, you know, once I finally got good enough to play the game, I realized, oh, the music is not just like the normal Peter Gun theme. It's like, I was wondering, you know, Emerson Lake and Palmer did a rendition of Peter Gun back in the 70s. was a minor hit for them. And I was like, was this, is this kind of like a riff on what they were doing? But it sounds like it's not. No, no, it's not. It was, we weren't even a, you know, I don't, I don't know what the timing on the, on the ELP song was, but I certainly wasn't inspired by it. Maybe Tom was, maybe, you know, maybe Tom Neiman was, because he, Tom suggested it. And I was like, Peter Gunn. It's like, you mean that old private eye show? So. Yeah, but that is that, is that the first instance?

of dynamic music in a video game, there probably might have been something before it, but I can't think of anything. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm, you know, very well could have been. I was sort of driven by hey, I want to replicate those moments, those James Bond moments.

And there's also the notion of, you know, like sort of the zen of driving music, right? Like sort of the you know, the endless road. You know, we had we had big plans for the game, but the game went out on test. It did really well. And then it was a rush to produce it. And it turned out to be the

company's hit in, I think, 84, 85 time frame. And sort of re-energized and made the company survive because it was a really tough time. I think they had dropped down to like, you know, from, you know, 1100 games a day that dropped down to like, you know, 100 games a day. Right. Well, I think a big part of its success, you know, aside from it's cool and it's got Peter Gunn music blaring and it kind of feels like Knight Rider, like it was, you know, very much zeitgeisty. But I think, you know, the pay-to-play proposition for the game was really interesting where basically you had infinite lives for the first minute or so. And then after you run out of that time, then that's, you know, you've got X number of lives, however many you didn't, how many, however many cars you didn't crash.

And then, you know, once you're, once you're out of cars, and that's it. But there is this kind of like buffer where anyone can play for a little while and feel like oh wow I'm cool even though I keep crashing I'm still you know blowing up cars and running motorcycles off the road so that was um that was uh Tom Leone's genius and um we didn't go out and test that way so matter of fact we didn't start out that way but what we found is that uh people it was a hard game to play and so people would get killed you know you're just getting on the road and people would get killed. And the way that the hardware worked was that we didn't have a very sophisticated. We were not a ram-based system like the Williams systems like Defender. So our streaming,

if you will, was very crude. We would buffer the next page and bring it in. And that limitation made the ability for, you know, like the cars coming up behind you and stuff could be really deadly as you merged, as you tried to merge onto the road. So we found that people were dying very quickly when we first tested. And then Tom suggested, hey, why don't we, let's change the scheme up. And it turned out that that was genius. Yeah, well, it definitely, you know, was for someone, as young as I was at the time. It was definitely kind of like a nice little perk to give me

motivation to keep playing because I got enough to really get a taste for it and not just, you know, immediately crash and say, well, this sucks. It wasn't quite free to play, but it was right there. Right. It was the same sort of, same sort of mentality. Training wheels, basically, for your sports car. Yeah, that's right. Yep. All right. Well, I know you have to have to take off this morning, but, you know, just to wind down, would you like to talk briefly about kind of what you're working on now, where you are, and where people can find you online if they want to check out your work and check out what you're doing? Right. So, you know, I've been very fortunate. My entire career has been designing entertainment stuff, and I've been able to bounce around and

do many things that I'm interested in. And so, you know, I designed those early 80s, late 70s games that I discussed. And then I left Midway in 84. I worked as a toy invent, and then I went to work as a toy inventor at Marvin Glass and Associates, which was an independent toy invention consulting firm. We licensed the toys to, you know, all the major toy companies. And after that, I did novelty games. You know, I did a bunch of, you know, like ticket spitter type arcade, big arcade games. If you ever want to see a really cool cabinet, look up Hawk Avenger. That's a game that I did for a company called Bromley. I made the whole cabinet look like a helicopter. And then, you know, I did, I eventually got hooked up with, once Bally Midway had been acquired

by Williams, I went to work as a pinball designer, and I designed pinball machines at Bally and Williams pretty much through the 90s. And then I worked on some console games for Midway, starting in like, you know, 99, 2000. At the time, I worked on the NBA Ballers series of games, and I did that up until 2008. And now I'm back in pinball. I've been back in pinball for a while, and I'm the chief creative officer for Stern Pinball.

I run the development studio. It's like roughly 50 developers creating the state of the art in pinball games. so yeah so that's uh that's a synopsis of my career and you can poke around and look at some of the stuff uh i've done i'm sure you can find um a bunch of that stuff currently a lot of my name comes up a lot for pinball recently because of all the you know because of my involvement with with stern and valley and and midway but uh like i said i did toys and the games we just talked about i had a hand in satan's hollow also uh back in the midway days and

And I'm blessed, I'm blessed, a career-making fun stuff, you know. Yeah, are you on social media where people can find you and follow you? Yeah, I'm absolutely. I'm on Instagram and I have a Facebook account, both in my name. So you can find, you can see what I, most of the stuff I post now is related to pinball. But every once in a while I dig into the archives, there's a bunch of video game stuff that I put up every so often. And the good folks at the Strong Museum are going

to be taking the bulk of my collection related to, you know, all of those years of doing stuff. That's awesome. All right. Well, George, thanks so much for your time. It was great having you on. And honestly, I'd love to have you on again

some time to talk more about your work in pinball and, you know, kind of the post midway, post golden arcade boom era type stuff. So hope to have you on again sometime. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thanks again. Anytime you want, let's sign something up.

Awesome. Sounds great. You know, Thank you.